If this sort of thing fascinates you as it does me, you might be interested in the latest Charles Stross book that features relatavistic finance as a major plot point. Here's a preview chapter: http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/06/neptunes-brood-excerpt
> Mr. Krugman himself thinks it's "the best thing by far written on the subject to date"
I'm a big fan of Charles Stross, but it may be worth pointing out that Krugman goes on to say that this is partly because it's the only thing written on the subject to date.
(In particular, he's distinguishing "interstellar finance" as in Neptune's Brood from "interstellar trade" as in his own earlier paper.)
This book is the first thing I though of reading this.
I don't know about the viability of the sort of economy Charles Stross uses in this book, but I found it refreshingly thought through. Might also be worth noting that he goes into some interesting concepts with regards to cryptocurrencies.
If it's anything like the Family Trade series of books then the economic or financial subject may only be used to colour the main plot and give a mood. I don't expect the author to actually be a "hard-economic" author like Stefan Baxter is a hard-science author.
If it we were discussing a greater interstellar human civilization, (and let's face it, the idea of aliens is silly) there is one additional interesting problem: the time dilation colonist experience will mean they will be permanently behind the Earth by a number of years equal to the distance they travel. And their knowledge will be double that obsolescence.
For example: they leave at the speed of light for a star 50 light years away. On Earth 50 years pass but no time passes for the colonist. So when they arrive they are technically where the earth was 50 years before. They set up shop and transmit their wonderful ideas and technology, which takes 50 more years to be received. Which means it's 100 years out of date.
Meanwhile the Earth beams its ideas to the colonists. Even on they day the land, the colonist can tune into their favorite sitcom without missing an episode (because of course they were traveling side by side with those transmissions and the subsequent fifty years were following behind in a lovely tail of vapid entertainment). So the Earth's information is still quite useful to them.
And this disparity in value can never be corrected. If the Earth moans about the uselessness of the colonist 100 year old ideas and sends suggestions, the colonist will have been listening to the Earth for 100 years anyway before they hear those suggestions and will already moved far beyond them. Yet still be 50 years behind.
However, a trade in ideas vs. resources might work if the Sol system ever became highly resource constrained.
With the Sol system being permanently decades ahead of the colonies, a steady stream of resource haulers back would provide additional mass for Sol citizens to utilize, making it a fair trade in some circumstances. The problem arises when the trade becomes imbalanced or needs to stop, there's a lag time of decades to push out such an order.
Yeah, they could just ship hydrogen back. They could also beam lasers at us although I image it would be awfully wide by the time it got here.
Also, so as long is the energy to ship it is less than the energy to create it by fusion, it would be economical to ship elements heavier than iron. But that would mean annoyingly slow speeds.
The really annoying thing is that by adding trillions of people to the universe, we apparently won't really improve the rate of idea creation. I really hope I'm missing something on this.
That's not necessarily true. Divergent evolution of ideas means that there could be some truly primitive ideas that's still useful to us today simply because we never went down that particular tree in our development. It's hard for us to imagine, but that's the point. I mean just look at how many of our everyday gadgets hasn't changed much in the last 100 years. Zippers for instance:)
That's likely true, assuming that communications in the future will always be limited by the speed of light.
I take the opposite view, that over great enough distances only information is a viable source of trade. That is, assuming quick enough communications.
Why can't the usual comparative advantage arguments work? The USA trades with many African countries, even though there is nothing those African countries can do better than the USA - just like your colonists.
Comparative advantage when the commodity is ideas? Intriguing.
How it works for physical good is clear. But how can one society produce one category of ideas cheaply while another produces a different category of ideas cheaply?
I don't see why it wouldn't work for ideas just as well as physical goods. Maybe you are smarter than me and can do research in physics and biology much better than me, but you can't do both - so we're better off if you do physics really well and I do biology not so well and we trade. There's no more reason that 2 planets cannot specialize in different kinds of science or math than 2 universities cannot have different strengths.
I would think that maybe the intention is of encountering an alien species is silly because it's most likely not going to happen, not the existence of.
If it is existence of, then that's just human bias/arrogance.
I conjecture the odds that humans will colonize other stars is close to 100% (it's what living things do, expand maximally)
But the odds that we will find an alien species that happens to be on a level of development interesting to either party looks less likely. We don't carry on commerce with chimps or dolphins and they are obviously much closer to us than any alien would be. Of course we may as well look for them, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Also, I enjoy using the word silly at every opportunity.
> We don't carry on commerce with chimps or dolphins and they are obviously much closer to us than any alien would be.
It's a little odd to compare non-technological species with those capable of interstellar travel. We don't do commerce with chimps/dolphins because they don't have anything of value to us (at least, not that we can't just take ourselves w/force).
Plus, encountering aliens isn't the same thing as encountering aliens we'd trade stuff with. You never mentioned that qualifier until the follow-up.
I mean we, chimps and, dolphins evolved on the same planet at the same time and have vast tracts of DNA in common yet the gap is huge.
So anything evolving at a different time period in a different environment (in the unlikely event it developed intelligence at all) would be so far beyond us, we would be, at best, as interesting as dolphins. Even if their development were ahead of us by only 1/100 of one percent of the time stars have been around, that still put them a 1.3 million years in advance of us. About the divergence time between us and a chimp. And chimps do make things, they clean twigs to scoop edible bugs and use leaves for umbrellas. But we have no interest in these things and they have no understanding of our idea of commerce even if we did.
But aliens per se? Sure. Indeed there maybe even bacteria as close as Mars and Europa.
I see no reason we would have the technology to terraform alien planets but not to genetically engineer some aliens to talk to or uplift local life forms to our own level of sapience.
The opening of Krugman's paper is wonderful (though it has nothing to do with interstellar trade):
"Many critics of conventional economics have argued, with considerable justification, that the assumptions underlying neoclassical theory bear little resemblance to the world we know. These critics have, however, been too quick to assert that this shows that mainstream economics can never be of any use. Recent progress in the technology of space travel, as well as the prospects of the use of space for energy production and colonization (O’Neill 1976) make this assertion doubtful; for they raise the distinct possibility that we may eventually discover or construct a world to which orthodox economic theory applies."
Haven't had time to read the paper yet, but the blogger seems to miss the obvious. We could probably assume civilizations capable of interstellar trade would have advanced enough genetic engineering and biological 3D printing such that trading lifeforms and their by-products between planets wouldn't be required. Different planets, with different atmospheres, geologies and ecosystems, would lead to comparative advantages in production though, which is the primary incentive behind trade relations. However the net benefit of trading would be at least partially offset by the cost of transporting goods over such long distances. With low thrust, high efficiency engines attached to the cargo the cost could be low enough to make trading an economic benefit, but that would require even longer time periods between the production of a good and its being put to good use. Civilizations would have to plan ahead and estimate the supply and demand many years, centuries or millenia into the future. You could really have a lot of fun with this kind of analysis. Looking forward to reading the full paper later.
>Civilizations would have to plan ahead and estimate the supply and demand many years, centuries or millenia into the future.
With even informational signals taking years to decades to centuries each to reach their destinations, our current knowledge of physics implies that a civilization basically needs to achieve indefinite cultural lifespan before they can do anything interstellar whatsoever.
So once you've got people who can maintain records and culture over centuries on detailed matters (or who just plain live that long), it's really not that much of an obstacle. But it's a nastily high mountain to climb in terms of bootstrapping your interstellar empire.
> Different planets, with different atmospheres, geologies and ecosystems, would lead to comparative advantages in production though, which is the primary incentive behind trade relations.
Not just advantages - some organisms rely on extremely complex symbiotic relationships and environmental stimuli (e.g. fungi in the genus Morchella). Reproducing these conditions, even with advanced technology, could be extremely challenging or impossible, which could create enough demand to justify physical transportation of goods. (This is essentially the plot to the science fiction novel I'm writing.)
"Reproducing these conditions, even with advanced technology, could be extremely challenging or impossible, which could create enough demand to justify physical transportation of goods. (This is essentially the plot to the science fiction novel I'm writing.)"
That was the main idea in Frank Herbert's Dune - "the spice". It's a good strategy to follow a tested winning idea, good luck with your writing!
Tell me, have you read the original Dune and the accompanying Dune Encyclopedia? They're basically the foundations of the fictional science of terraforming ecology.
Turn based games strategy games have a resurgence in popularity and become things passed down the family.
"See this knight? My great-grandfather recruited it into this CIV V game 72 years ago. Now it is time for it to fulfil its destiny and crush the archer built by the Bob's great uncle"
I think the interstellar protocols would have to be redesigned around UDP, because a reliable protocol would have too many round-trips and would be intolerably slow.
It is possible to engage in constant communication even with a very long delay. Simply both start sending questions of a certain theme, and after the one-way time you can have a fluid conversation, albeit the theme of conversation will change very slowly.
I seem to remember that the original cargo of the Out of Band II in A Fire Upon the Deep was part of a one time pad - the ship held data that had to be xor-ed with data being carried by other ships (presumably so they couldn't keep a copy and read all of the messages).
Wasn't Pham also regarded as terribly naive for believing that public key encyrption would be secure? When they are discussing things in the bar scene where they first meet the skroderiders....
I believe that's a laser. But you would have to make sure somehow that it wouldn't reflect off of any particles en route. Which would likely be impossible... unless the wavelength was very, very long, I think.
Also, the laser would spread out, but it would still be mostly in one direction.
There's a post by Robin Hanson ("http://hanson.gmu.edu/econofsf.html") that discusses this issue with more references on the topic (including the Krugman article).
"The fact being that almost any cargo along these lines (made of the elements produced across the universe by stellar nucleosynthesis and supernovae) is going to be a) most likely available in any system already, b) definitely available for the taking from billions of unoccupied regions of space."
Yet, for example in Australia (at least Tasmania) under British colonial period, raw materials such as wood for housing was imported from Carelia (through Britain), although local better materials (e.g. rooting-resistant Huon pine trees) could be found in abundance. Sometimes the logic is defied by other human behavioral factors, sometimes the simple economical reasoning does not tell the whole story, so I wouldn't be surprised if water will be traded.
"A few billion years of natural selection and evolution on any given planet will produce an array of wonderful and useful lifeforms, that could be unique enough to be of interest elsewhere."
Considering our history in messing up the natural habitats and ecosystems, and also considering that we ended up with restrictions on introducing living organisms in many places here on Earth, I'm also not surprised if stronger restriction will be set up for trading such things on even more separate environments such as planets. I see instead good prospects for interstellar tourism, with clients willing to travel vast distances just to see those living "Bunny rabbits and butterflies" in their natural environment.
The nastier issue isn't interstellar trade but interstellar conquest. Trade between stars is very expensive, even for a fairly sophisticated civilization (think of the opportunity costs of waiting decades for a package from interstellar Amazon to arrive!). It's usually much cheaper to make things from local materials and swap data packets with your stellar neighbors.
The problem, of course, is that eventually you might well exhaust the resources of your local solar system. A sufficiently long-lived civilization will do so, no matter how sustainable they are, unless they manage some kind of trick to conquer entropy or basic conservation laws.
Which means you'll need a worked-out interstellar legal framework for laying claim to uninhabited solar systems as destinations for colonies when the time comes to "move house".
And all of this is presuming you're operating at a high enough level of technology and civilization to even gain entry to the Interstellar Club in the first place.
I disagree. Even stars run down, and there's also the issue of drifting debris clouds and various other "Natural Disasters IN SPAAAACE!". Though, yes, admittedly, a star-faring civilization might be developed enough that "moving house" becomes an applicable metaphor: if your old star runs down, just move to a new one that's unoccupied, and since life is rare there will be plenty of those.
Hmmmm... Now I'm imagining a huge set of future Highly Developed Civilizations conducting some kind of scientific conference to share their progress on the matter of the Last Question, since they all realize the bind they're in and would rather work on the problem scientifically now to get increased or unlimited resource sustainability rather than pillage the universe and end up fighting wars with relativistic weaponry in a few billion years.
Biological things can be transmitted just as raw information through a radio broadcast or something. Just upload the genetic code. Same with most art. Even physical things, you could upload the data necessary to replicate them.
Yes, though you'd still need to have a biological assembler from the original biosphere, for the genetic code is just a set of instructions for nanomachinery common on Earth, not a XYZ blueprint. Most of the information that form living creatures is embedded in the workings of replication machinery, not in the DNA itself.
(see also GEB for more detailed discussion about where exactly the "information" lies in systems)
That would be a one time transport though, not a continuous trading relationship. Also the biological assembler can still be transmitted as information. We are talking about futuristic and alien civilizations with far more advanced technology, certainly it would be possible.
Even with the interstellar maximal exploitable "radio broadcast" communication bandwidth (the entire frequency spectrum, light included), it is problematic to send some large chunks of data such as genetic blueprints. It can be done, of course, but when faced with option of sending N different DNAs with N large enough, just sending the data in capsules may become a reasonable option (and so, the "communication packet" becomes physical again).
Novelty and luxury are a huge part of our global economy, and as time progresses, I expect that to increase. Yes, it would be an enormous cost to have an original work of art created by an alien master artist shipped to your home / corporate headquarters, but it's the kind of thing that I think those wealthy enough will want, even in a world of 3d printing.
In fact, high cost is a benefit in large parts of the luxury market, as part of the point is often to signal status, so presumably a lot of people will want it exactly to signal that they can afford to have an original instead of those pesky "fake" 3d prints.
He covers that somewhat in the article, and basically comes to the conclusion that intellectual property will still be interesting and have value. People might also be interested in hand(/tentacle?)crafted wares from other planets. I know I would be at the right price.
Not all aliens, but generally we're only concerned with aliens that could potentially affect us. Since we can't travel that far away from our planet right now (and we know that there seems to be no life capable planet nearby - with a loose definition of "nearby"), any alien that we can meet right now would have to be quite a bit more advanced to us.
The aliens haven't found us. I think the best hope of contact is if we develop interstellar travel first and go looking for them. I think the premise of the paper depends on mankind possessing this technology.
Because the timescale of the universe is much longer than the timescale of human civilization or intelligence. The odds of any aliens we meet being at the exact same level of development as humans (to within ten thousand years or so) despite having evolved independently on a planet billions of years old, are extremely small. In the vast majority of cases they will be millions of years more advanced or millions of years less. As chimps don't build starships, it follows that almost every interstellar civilization we find will be godlike compared to us.
In other words, we are a newborn intelligent species, and newborns generally find that everyone around them is older.
You're assuming that being older implies having more capabilities. Civilizations like ours almost certainly reach limits, either in terms of resource limits, or in terms of fundamental limits on the kinds of things that can be engineered (or both). The fact we've never run into any alien tourists or explorers, despite thousands of years of record keeping and being able to search the earth for alien artifacts, and our own research into star travel support the idea that it's impossible.
They would likely be millions of years ahead of us. It's very unlikely two intelligent species would happen to evolve within a few thousand years of each other. So either natural evolution, or more likely self-modification, would have had tons of time to improve. Not to mention artificial intelligence.
They could be millions or billions of times more intelligent than us. And imagine a mind the size of the Earth, or the size of Jupiter, with the energy of their entire star.
There's reason to think that we're maxed out on intelligence. Our heads are about as big as could fit through the birth canal. A brain as big as a planet couldn't possibly work, and if it had the energy of a star, it would be made of plasma at millions of degrees Kelvin.
We are actually only on the cusp of intelligence. The very first things to emerge from evolution capable of building a technological civilization. If it were possible for chimpanzee brains to build a technological civilization, we would be having this conversation at an even lower level of intelligence. The brain was designed by evolution, a very stupid and slow process. We are the result of iteratively improving what worked good at controlling locomotion in fish. Certainly we can make improvements, certainly we can do better.
The fact that the human brain is limited to fitting through the birth canal is a great example. With c-sections that isn't particularly relevant, and computers/AI aren't limited in size or energy requirements at all (or at least not anywhere near the same constraints that humans have.) So imagine if brains that constraint was removed and you made brains dozens, hundreds, or even millions of times larger.
You could build a computer the size of a planet, though it would require a ridiculous amount of technological ability. The energy of a star doesn't mean literally as hot as a star, but something like thousands of solar panels to efficiently collect as much of the energy as possible for powering the enormous computer. It was just an example of what the limits of technology might be.
A) Our cognitive structure is not actually that stupid. Note that many-layered neural networks are at the forefront of modern Machine Learning, a discipline carried out by educated, technology-using sapients who will immediately switch to some better technique the instant they find one. Indeed, there is active research into better learning techniques. Neural networks may not be the peak, but they're Pretty Good enough that they didn't evolve "by mistake" in nature.
B) We are still evolving. The big overwhelming FACT of civilization didn't halt our evolution, it just changed the nature of the selection pressures. Whereas raw, physical survivability was once the prime selection factor, civilization has made reproductive desirability, social cooperation, and parenting ability (all inter-related but nonidentical) the larger selection pressures on human genomes.
C) The big new adaptation that made us humans what we are was only maybe intelligence. It was probably extelligence: the ability to store knowledge in the social group rather than the individual. That way, you can build your collective knowledge over time.
D) You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools.
Artificial neural networks are only one method among many, and they are only vaguely similar to biological ones. Neural nets are only good at exactly what biological ones are good at; pattern recognition. They can't do any optimization at all. They aren't going to be rewriting their own code any time soon.
Modern computers are millions of times faster than the human brain, and can in theory be made much more energy efficient and compact and probably cheaper.
Yes we are still evolving, though at a ridiculously slow pace. And the traits that are currently spreading aren't exactly good. The genes responsible for sociopathy are becoming more frequent since we don't live in small communities anymore. Intelligence is being strongly selected against at the moment as counter-intuitive as that seems. Less intelligent individuals tend to reproduce far more frequently for whatever reason.
"Extelligence" doesn't really explain much. Sure a mind on it's own might not accomplish much, but we still have to explain what it is about human minds that allow them to think and learn in the first place. Can apes be taught language? If they were would they gain higher level intelligence or does it take more than that? I bet it isn't that simple.
>You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools.
I don't know where your preference comes from but I would love to see the planets get converted into giant computers and minds. We should optimize the universe for our values, rather than preserving the random state it was put in by nature.
>I don't know where your preference comes from but I would love to see the planets get converted into giant computers and minds. We should optimize the universe for our values, rather than preserving the random state it was put in by nature.
Congratulations! You're the first person outside /r/hpmor to make my Chemical Shed List for Irresponsibly-Applied Phlebotinum! When shit gets real, I will take you out behind the chemical sheds and shoot you.
People like the so-called random state things were put in by nature. Saturn, for instance, is pretty the way it is. Hell, think about it this way: what if I suggested that your house you actually live in is simply suboptimal as a house, and should instead be converted into a huge brain I can use for thinking? After all, it's just another step in my optimizing the universe for my values, which apparently include adolescent dick-waving and solving lots of math problems rather than a human civilization with people to talk to.
Well, you shouldn't want to do that, because after all, you need a place to live. More broadly, even if you've "gone virtual" (as you indicate some desire to do in occasional hard-SF threads), you're still a human being, and you're supposed to have sentimental attachments. Sentimental attachments are, after all, what make us human in the first place.
This whole "planet-sized X" thing, for all X other than planets, is basically just another adolescent power fantasy. Consider that if Ultimate Power, or some semblance thereof, seems to be your goal in life, there may in fact be something wrong with you. I can't actually think of anything a human being wants other than raw power that is served by wrecking entire planets.
Real life is not a scifi novel, not even the finer grade of scifi novel.
>"Extelligence" doesn't really explain much. Sure a mind on it's own might not accomplish much, but we still have to explain what it is about human minds that allow them to think and learn in the first place. Can apes be taught language? If they were would they gain higher level intelligence or does it take more than that? I bet it isn't that simple.
Actually, gorillas have been taught simple sign-language before and can form coherent sentences. Chimpanzees have been observed learning and passing down more advanced tool-using skills than we thought they were capable of. Human children, raised without exposure to language and culture, don't naturally turn out as civilized "human beings" of the kind we expect to meet.
There are trillions of planets in the universe. Maybe even in our own galaxy. Converting a few of them to computers is pretty minor. Your preference is about as arbitrary as not wanting to destroy any trees in the entire world, or even not wanting to kill a single bacteria or move a single pebble.
I have no idea what kind of goals and desires a futuristic civilization will have. I can imagine a lot of possible goals that could be possibly benefit from giant computers and other mega-projects. But even short of that, you could still just say why not?
The universe is our sandbox. The sand isn't intelligent, it doesn't care what shape it's in. And it wasn't put in it's current shape for any particular reason. But we can build beautiful castles in it that we appreciate. We can play and have fun in it, and it won't matter to the sand one way or the other, but it will matter to us. And at the end of the day the tide will probably wipe it all away anyways.
Apes still have massively reduced brain sizes and are missing many of the adaptions humans had. As far as I am aware teaching them language was only partially successful and they still are nowhere near human level. And it still tells us absolutely nothing about how the brain actually works.
Trying to reproduce human-style decision making in a piece of software is only done as a last resort. It's a small miracle whenever it works. Interestingly, genetic algorithms seem to do more interesting things than neural networks. What does that say about brains vs evolution?
> civilization has made reproductive desirability, social cooperation, and parenting ability (all inter-related but nonidentical) the larger selection pressures on human genomes
Looking at the people that have the biggest families, it's hard to say what, exactly, is being selected for. They seem to like children.
> You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools.
Admittedly, since we've known that overexploiting the Earth's resources would do that for something like 50 years now, I don't so much blame humanity in general as the narrow but powerful subset who decided it was better to overexploit and destroy civilization than to make a bit less money.
It's been pretty much essential. Earth's entire land area used to be wilderness. Now a substantial proportion of it is farmland, without which we wouldn't eat. It's a tool for enabling civilization.
It hasn't really started killing us yet -- the population is expanding. This civilization may and probably will collapse, like the Romans, but I'm not sure exactly how a civilization could grow exponentially forever, so it's kind of inevitable.
Or, if we get really good at bioengineering, we could figure out how to fit more brainpower into less space, and thus allow the skull to shrink a little bit.
Maybe I misread you. Did you mean a mind that has the energy of a star at its command? Still, that's more energy than you could possibly use. Consider that the sun has far more mass than the rest of the solar system put together, and all of it is extremely hot.
Mr. Krugman himself thinks it's "the best thing by far written on the subject to date" (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-in...)